Library Boy

Legal research news from an Ottawa law librarian

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Vacation Time - I'm Off for Two Weeks!

I haven't been making very long posts recently for 2 reasons:

1) I had to prepare for my vacation that begins Saturday - my wife and I are flying off to British Columbia to hike and camp, visit abandoned mines, see whales, do some rafting, try not to fall off horses, and fight off rattlesnakes in the desert-like part of the province near the U.S. border. My wife also plans to jump off a cliff while we're there - OK,OK, she wants to take paragliding lessons. To me, it sounds like jumping off a cliff... We have not told her mother about any of this.

2) since a few days ago, I now also have to prepare to move to another city - in late September, we will be moving to Ottawa where I start a new reference librarian job at the Supreme Court of Canada (more when I get back from B.C.). My wife will be freelancing as a graphic designer.

Let's see: I have to uproot and move hundreds of kilometres East of here in a few weeks so the logical thing to do is to take off until close to Labour Day by going thousands of kilometres West of here... "Living on the edge". Maybe I'll jump off that cliff too. Just kidding: we already have a place to stay in Ottawa while looking for permanent digs. If anyone knows of a place up for rent as of late Sept/early October, you know where to find me...

Cliff's Notes, 2005 - Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, that includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity

As I state in the article, "I answered off the top of my head (essentially guessing based on street posters I’ve read, because, of course I would never be seen in a Goth club), and by perusing a copy of Now magazine [free entertainment weekly]. Who would have guessed that looking closely at all those strange posters as I walk along Queen Street West would come in handy one day in my professional life?".

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Honoré Daumier Lithograph Collections and Corrupt Lawyers

The Librarians' Index to the Internet features 2 items this week about 19th century French artist Honoré Daumier, who gained notoriety for his often acerbic caricatures of the monarchy, politicians, and the French middle class. He is especially well-known for his Les gens de justice collection attacking the corrupt practices of lawyers of his time.

The 2 sites are:

Honoré Daumier and His Lithographic WorkThis site is maintained by 2 Swiss-based collectors and includes a detailed biography, a list of more than 700 Daumier exhibitions, a list of significant collections, and the "Daumier Register", a "digital work catalogue giving detailed information and at least one photograph for each of the 4,000 Daumier lithographs."

Honoré Daumier Lithographs: Brandeis University CollectionsThe site features a Daumier timeline, a slide show of Daumier lithographs, a link to a database with images of thousands of Daumier lithographs, and a bibliography. The University owns one of the major Daumier collections in North America.

Is an Annual Report in Your Library’s Future?The author explains that she originally looked into the content, structure and dissemination of library annual reports in the academic environment, but she adds that the principles can apply to law libraries in any setting

"How has the electronic work environment influenced the ways we collaborate and build information infrastructures within existing legal and institutional frameworks? What do we need to know about the technical infrastructure in order to communicate effectively with one another? How are we going to keep up with changes in information technology so that we can serve our users better and meet their expectations?"

The afternoon panel will be hosted by Steven Cohen of Library Stuff fame and will address digital rights management, with a look at digital repositories, copyright, open access and digital licensing. The panelists are Virginia Jones from Access Copyright, Ross Gordon from the Council of Federal Libraries and Russell McOrmond from Digital Copyright Canada.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Current Cites Current Awareness Site 15th Anniversary

Current Cites is turning 15. I've been reading it as an occasional source of current awareness since about the year 2000.

Current Cites is a high quality monthly newsletter that evaluates the "best" articles in information technology and librarianship from professional magazines, journals, web sites and books.

According to the press release marking the occasion, Current Cites first "came out as a paper insert to the library newsletter at UC Berkeley. The original intent was to provide an in-house guide to the rapidly expanding literature in information science. Soon however, the first electronic version became available through the University of California MELVYL system. Next came distribution through the PACS-L mailing list, and subsequently through a myriad of systems and protocols that reads like a glossary to technology in the 1990's: FTP, Gopher, WAIS, and finally the Web. Most recently, Current Cites completed a move to WebJunction.org, a library support site managed by OCLC and supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation."

The study was released last week by metasearch engine Dogpile and researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University.

"The implications of these findings are significant for both searchers and marketers. Searchers relying on a single search engine are missing a vast swath of web content that they could easily find simply by trying their queries on other engines... Effectively, for more than two-thirds of all queries, each search engine is likely to give you completely different results."

Plain Language Resources for Law, Business, Government, and Life

Clear language or plain language refers to jargon-free, understandable language. For the past 20 years or more, an international movement has been working to make the language used in law, health information, financial services, commerce and business more accessible. Plain language does NOT mean dumbed down or simplistic vocabulary.

The article refers to many plain language writing resources, including many in the legal field.

Major plain language resources include:

PLAIN – Plain Language International Network : This is an international movement with members from Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, New Zealand, and Japan. The Web site contains editing and writing resources for legal and business writers, journalists and scientists, links to governmental plain language initiatives in the USA, Canada and Sweden, a news archive as well as the conference proceedings of the September 2002 PLAIN conference held in Toronto and other conferences. 2002 Conference participants also made available a list of suggested print and Web resources.

Plain English Campaign :The granddaddy of the clear language lobbies, this UK-based group attracts lots of media attention because of its well-known annual awards for the most obscure and indecipherable examples of gobbledygook in the English-speaking world: the Golden Bull Awards for business and government obfuscation and the Foot in Mouth Award fo the year’s most baffling quote. Many of you might remember that actor Richard Gere won the Foot in Mouth Award in 2002 for his insightful comment "I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I'd think 'No, actually I am a giraffe’." And in 2003, United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld won the coveted Foot in Mouth Award for comments made in a press briefing. You may recall (who doesn't?): "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know." Whatever...

Clear Language and Design - CLAD : A Toronto-based consultancy group, CLAD was a co-sponsor of the 2002 PLAIN conference mentioned above. Among other services, CLAD has invented a Reading Effectiveness Tool to find out if your draft manuscript is at the right level for your intended audience. This interactive tool is based on the Simple Measure Of Gobbledegook (SMOG) readability formula.

Clarity : Law librarians will want to have a look. Clarity is an international association of lawyers and legal writers whose goals include clear legal writing for the general citizenry by avoiding archaic, obscure, and over-elaborate language.

Plain Language Action & Information Network : In the United States, this is a government-wide group of volunteers working to improve communications from the U.S. federal government to the public. Members include practitioners from many different segments of the U.S. public sector and the Web site includes many reference links and writing tools.

Writing for the Web : From the Web site of Internet usability guru Jakob Nielsen, links to research and guides on how better writing for the Web medium can boost usability.

The 100 Worst "Groaners" : As the site explains: "A 'groaner' is a hackneyed, overblown, stuffy or just plain silly cliché that turns up time after time in news scripts. Groaners show laziness on the part of writers, disrespect for the folks watching, and a general contempt for lively English. Here are some of the worst offenders. You’ll recognize them immediately, so get ready to groan!"

The collection includes material from the files of the Manhattan Project, "Top Secret Ultra" summaries and translations of intercepted Japanese diplomatic cable traffic, as well as translations from Japanese sources of high level meetings and discussions in Tokyo, including the conferences when Emperor Hirohito authorized the final decision to surrender.

The National Security Archive serves as a library and archive of declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. It is funded from publication revenues and from private philanthropists such as the Carnegie Corporation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

History of Conflict over U.S. Supreme Court Appointments

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for American Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts are anticipated for some time in September.

The history of U.S. Supreme Court nominations has often been one marked by open ideological conflict and political intrigue as shown in a recent National Public Radio report that examines the battles surrounding Clarence Thomas in 1991, Robert H. Bork in 1987, G. Harrold Carswell in 1970, Clement Haynsworth Jr. in 1969, and Abe Fortas in 1968.

Interviews with Library and Information World Innovators

The conversation is wide-ranging, covering everything from West's blogging tools to how she chooses what to write about, which authors she reads, whose writing (online and offline) she particularly admires, how to handle burn-out, how to limit how many RSS feeds to read, etc.

I particularly enjoy West's practical, no-nonsense philosophy that has allowed her to creatively use technology without losing perspective and becoming overwhelmed by it.

Monday, August 01, 2005

Law Journals - Staying Current

I've been using a current awareness service called Current Law Journal Content from the Washington and Lee University Law School for some time now.

The School covers more than 1000 law journals from around the world. Scans of journal content pages are supplied by the University of Texas Tarlton Law Library, Washington and Lee, other libraries, or are received electronically via e-mail, web-sites, or RSS feeds.

Current Law Journal Content can be used in a number of ways:

to display all the tables of contents for issues added during a user-selected date range

to search for words in article citations (author/title/abstract/journal name fields)

to link to tables of contents for any one of the 1039 individual law journals

One can customize the list of journals for which content information will be sent as well as the format of the transmission, including how new items are sorted (by journal name, date added, impact factor assigned to the law journal in Washington and Lee's Most-Cited Legal Periodicals list) , whether to add a link to the journal's website home page, whether in "full" or "brief" format, etc.

People can also add their own institution's openURL server if it has one.

Disclaimer

Neither the content nor the views contained in this blog represent the positions of my employer or of any association to which I belong. Any links to a news article, an academic study or another blog post should not be considered to indicate any form of endorsement on my part or on that of my institution. This is a purely personal blog for the purposes of sharing information about library issues and legal research.